Pennsylvania’s Voter-I.D. Law, Delayed

What turns an election, and what should? And when is it no longer possible to do so? In a Pennsylvania court on Tuesday, Judge Robert Simpson ruled that the state’s new, and highly dubious, voter-I.D. law would not go into effect before the election on November 6th. He did not reject the law, just the arguments, by its proponents, about what voters deserved, or didn’t deserve. They had argued that it shouldn’t be any trouble for people to get their papers in the sort of order that the law had envisioned, requiring a precise kind of photo I.D.s, and at first Judge Simpson had been inclined to agree. (The case had been sent back to him by the State Supreme Court.) “I expected more photo IDs to have been issued by this time,” he wrote. Only thirteen thousand were, and not, witnesses testified, for want of trying. “For this reason, I accept petitioners’ arguments that the remaining five weeks before the general election, the gap between the photo IDs issue and the estimated need will not be closed.”

Now they have more time. But this law was never really about a vision of what cards people ought to have in their wallets. Even if there was a Constitutional obligation not to be messy—and there is not—it would cut both ways in terms of voter I.D.s. Poor people and minorities in Pennsylvania more often had lives that were complicated in ways that made them less likely to have the right card; young people and the elderly often had lives that were, in a way, too uncomplicated to have them. Instead, it was, unabashedly, an effort by Republicans to keep people whose wallets tended to be in a certain state away from the polls. (The Fix has a good chronology.)

In some cases, the Republicans may still succeed. As the Times noted, ten other states have similar laws. And according to the terms of Judge Simpson’s ruling, poll workers will still ask for the I.D. that is not legally required. (He called this a “soft run,” according to the Post.) What effect will that have on people standing on line, who see those in front of them asked to produce something that they themselves might not be carrying? And Pennsylvania has an obligation now to make sure that all of the people who’ve been admonished to get their photo on a card now know that they don’t have to. No state, and no country, is better off for reducing civic participation—we have, if anything, an extra interest in making sure that the people least likely to keep waiting in a long line do so. A person who has spoken by voting is more likely to listen.

That is why Simpson spoke not of a gap between the number of I.D.s issued and the number desired, but of an actual “need.” Republicans may have hoped that keeping that gap wide would close another one—the gap between Mitt Romney’s poll numbers in Pennsylvania and Barack Obama’s. But that number, as John Cassidy has written, may be widening so much that voter suppression wouldn’t have been enough to do the trick anyway. That doesn’t mean that it would have been any less of a scandal: a person in a non-swing state unable to vote is still a person deprived of his or her civil rights. One can draw a comparison to the N.F.L. referees lockout: until a blown call actually cost someone a close, nationally televised game, the sense was that we’d all just have to put up with games that weren’t fair. It shouldn’t take that kind of hit to the integrity of the process to realize that voting rights are worth guarding.